History of publishing, an account of the selection, preparation, and marketing of printed matter from its origins in ancient times to the present. The activity has grown from small beginnings into a vast and complex industry responsible for the dissemination of all manner of cultural material; its impact upon civilization is impossible to calculate.

This article treats the history and development of book, newspaper, and magazine publishing in its technical and commercial aspects. The preparation and dissemination of written communication is followed from its beginnings in the ancient world to the modern period. For additional information on the preparation of early manuscripts, see writing. A more detailed examination of printing technology can be found in printing. The dissemination of published material via electronic media is treated in information processing. For a discussion of reference-book publishing, see the articles encyclopaedia; dictionary.

General considerations

The history of publishing is characterized by a close interplay of technical innovation and social change, each promoting the other. Publishing as it is known today depends on a series of three major inventions—writing, paper, and printing—and one crucial social development—the spread of literacy. Before the invention of writing, perhaps by the Sumerians in the 4th millennium bc, information could be spread only by word of mouth, with all the accompanying limitations of place and time. Writing was originally regarded not as a means of disseminating information but as a way to fix religious formulations or to secure codes of law, genealogies, and other socially important matters, which had previously been committed to memory. Publishing could begin only after the monopoly of letters, often held by a priestly caste, had been broken, probably in connection with the development of the value of writing in commerce. Scripts of various kinds came to be used throughout most of the ancient world for proclamations, correspondence, transactions, and records; but book production was confined largely to religious centres of learning, as it would be again later in medieval Europe. Only in Hellenistic Greece, in Rome, and in China, where there were essentially nontheocratic societies, does there seem to have been any publishing in the modern sense—i.e., a copying industry supplying a lay readership.

The invention of printing transformed the possibilities of the written word. Printing seems to have been first invented in China in the 6th century ad in the form of block printing. An earlier version may have been developed at the beginning of the 1st millennium bc, but, if so, it soon fell into disuse. The Chinese invented movable type in the 11th century ad but did not fully exploit it. Other Chinese inventions, including paper (ad 105), were passed on to Europe by the Arabs but not, it seems, printing. The reason may well lie in Arab insistence on hand copying of the Qurʾān (Arabic printing of the Qurʾān does not appear to have been officially sanctioned until 1825). The invention of printing in Europe is usually attributed to Johannes Gutenberg in Germany about 1440–50, although block printing had been carried out from about 1400. Gutenberg’s achievement was not a single invention but a whole new craft involving movable metal type, ink, paper, and press. In less than 50 years it had been carried through most of Europe, largely by German printers.

Printing in Europe is inseparable from the Renaissance and Reformation. It grew from the climate and needs of the first, and it fought in the battles of the second. It has been at the heart of the expanding intellectual movement of the past 500 years. Although printing was thought of at first merely as a means of avoiding copying errors, its possibilities for mass-producing written matter soon became evident. In 1498, for instance, 18,000 letters of indulgence were printed at Barcelona. The market for books was still small, but literacy had spread beyond the clergy and had reached the emerging middle classes. The church, the state, universities, reformers, and radicals were all quick to use the press. Not surprisingly, every kind of attempt was made to control and regulate such a “dangerous” new mode of communication. Freedom of the press was pursued and attacked for the next three centuries; but by the end of the 18th century a large measure of freedom had been won in western Europe and North America, and a wide range of printed matter was in circulation. The mechanization of printing in the 19th century and its further development in the 20th, which went hand in hand with increasing literacy and rising standards of education, finally brought the printed word to its powerful position as a means of influencing minds and, hence, societies.

The functions peculiar to the publisher—i.e., selecting, editing, and designing the material; arranging its production and distribution; and bearing the financial risk or the responsibility for the whole operation—often merged in the past with those of the author, the printer, or the bookseller. With increasing specialization, however, publishing became, certainly by the 19th century, an increasingly distinct occupation. Most modern Western publishers purchase printing services in the open market, solicit manuscripts from authors, and distribute their wares to purchasers through shops, mail order, or direct sales.

Published matter falls into two main categories, periodical and nonperiodical; i.e., publications that appear at more or less regular intervals and are members of a series and those that appear on single occasions (except for reissues of essentially the same material).

Of the nonperiodical publications, booksconstitute by far the largest class; they are also, in one form or another, the oldest of all types of publication and go back to the earliest civilizations. In giving permanence to man’s thoughts and records of his achievements, they answer a deep human need. Not every published book is of lasting value; but a nation’s books, taken as a whole and winnowed out by the passing years, can be said to be its main cultural storehouse. Conquerors or usurpers wishing to destroy a people’s heritage have often burned its books, as did Shih Huang-ti in China in 213 bc, the Spaniards in Mexico in 1520, and the Nazis in the 1930s.

There is no wholly satisfactory definition of a book, as the word covers a variety of publications (for example, some publications that appear periodically, such as The World Almanac and Book of Facts, may be considered books). For statistical purposes, however, the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization defines a book as “a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers.”

Periodical publications may be further divided into two main classes, newspapers and magazines. Though the boundary between them is not sharp—there are magazines devoted to news, and many newspapers have magazine features—their differences of format, tempo, and function are sufficiently marked: the newspaper (daily or weekly) usually has large, loose pages, a high degree of immediacy, and miscellaneous contents; whereas the magazine (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) has smaller pages, is usually fastened together and sometimes bound, and is less urgent in tone and more specialized in content. Both sprang up after the invention of printing, but both have shown a phenomenal rate of growth to meet the demand for quick information and regular entertainment. Newspapers have long been by far the most widely read published matter; the democratizing process of the 19th and 20th centuries would be unthinkable without them. Magazines, close behind newspapers both historically and in terms of readership, rapidly branched out from their learned origins into “periodicals of amusement.” Today there is probably not a single interest, frivolous or serious, of man, woman, or child, that is not catered to by a magazine.

There are, of course, many other types of publications besides books, newspapers, and magazines. In many cases the same principles of publishing apply, and it is only the nature of the product and the technicalities of its manufacture that are different. There is, for instance, the important business of map and atlas publishing. Another important field is music publishing, which produces a great variety of material, from complete symphonic scores to sheet music of the latest popular hit. A further range of activities might be grouped under the term “utility publishing”; i.e., the issuing of calendars, diaries, timetables, ready reckoners, guide books, and all manner of informational or directional material, not to mention postcards and greeting cards. A great deal of occasional publishing, of pamphlets and booklets, is done by organizations to further particular aims or to spread particular views; e.g., by churches, religious groups, societies, and political parties. This kind of publishing is sometimes subsidized.

Book publishing

The form, content, and provisions for making and distributing books have varied widely during their long history, but in general it may be said that a book is designed to serve as an instrument of communication. The Babylonian clay tablet, the Egyptian papyrus roll, the medieval vellum codex, the printed paper volume, the microfilm, and various other combinations have served as books. The great variety in form is matched by an equal variety in content. Both Shakespeare’s collected plays, first published in 1623, and the most ill-conceived and trivial tract published in that or any other year were designed as instruments of communication.

The book is also characterized by its use of writing or some other system of visual symbols (such as pictures or musical notation) to convey a meaning. As a sophisticated medium of communication, it requires mastery of the hard-won skills of reading and writing. Another distinguishing feature is publication for tangible circulation. A temple column with a message carved on it is not a book. Signs and placards that are easy enough to transport are made to attract the eyes of passers-by from a fixed location and thus are not usually considered books. Private documents not intended for circulation also are not considered to be books.

A book, for the purpose of this discussion, is a written (or printed) message of considerable length, meant for public circulation and recorded on materials that are light yet durable enough to afford comparatively easy portability. Its primary purpose is to carry a message between people, depending on the twin faculties of portability and permanence. As such, the book transcends time and space to announce, to expound, and to preserve and transmit knowledge. Books have attended the preservation and dissemination of knowledge in every literate society. The following account, keeping mainly within the scope of civilization as it developed in western Europe and North America, considers the book as it appeared at different times in history, the characteristic content and survival of copies and texts, and the means of production and distribution.

How soon after the invention of writing men began to make books is uncertain because the books themselves have not survived. The oldest surviving examples of writing are on clay or stone. The more fragile materials used for writing at various times have generally perished. The earliest known books are the clay tablets of Mesopotamia and the papyrus rolls of Egypt. There are examples of both dating from the early 3rd millennium bc.

Books on clay tablets

The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites wrote on tablets made from water-cleaned clay. Although these writing bricks varied in shape and dimension, a common form was a thin quadrilateral tile about five inches long. While the clay was still wet, the writer used a stylus to inscribe it with cuneiform characters. By writing on every surface in small characters, he could copy a substantial text on a single tablet. For longer texts he used several tablets, linking them together by numbers and catchwords as is done in modern books.

Book production on clay tablets probably continued for 2,000 years. The nature and volume of the surviving records from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor indicate a heavy emphasis on the preservative function of writing and the book. Either dried in the sun or baked in a kiln, clay tablets were almost indestructible. The latter process was used for texts of special value, legal codes, royal annals, and epics to ensure greater preservation. Buried for thousands of years in the mounds of forgotten cities, they have been removed intact in modern archaeological excavations. The number of clay tablets recovered approaches 500,000, but new finds continually add to the total. The largest surviving category consists of private commercial documents and government archives. Of the remainder, many are duplications of texts.

Clay tablets are usually associated with cuneiform writing, a script that takes its modern name from the wedge-shaped (from Latin cuneus, “wedge”) marks made by the stylus in clay. When the Aramaic language and alphabet arose in the 6th century bc, the clay tablet book declined because clay was less suited than papyrus to the Aramaic characters.

The Egyptian papyrus roll

The papyrus roll of ancient Egypt is more nearly the direct ancestor of the modern book than is the clay tablet. Papyrus as a writing material resembles paper. It was made from a reedy plant of the same name that flourishes in the Nile Valley. Strips of papyrus pith laid at right angles on top of each other and pasted together made cream-coloured papery sheets. Although the sheets varied in size, ordinary ones measured about five to six inches wide. The sheets were pasted together to make a long roll. To make a book, the scribe copied a text on the side of the sheets where the strips of pith ran horizontally, and the finished product was rolled up with the text inside.

The use of papyrus affected the style of writing just as clay tablets had done. Scribes wrote on it with a reed pen or brush and inks of different colours. The result could be very decorative, especially when done in the monumental hieroglyphic style of writing, a style best adapted to stone inscriptions. The Egyptians created two cursive hands, the hieratic (priestly) and the demotic (a simplified form of hieratic suited to popular use), which were better adapted to papyrus.

Compared with tablets, papyrus is fragile, yet an example is extant from 2500 bc; and stone inscriptions that are even older portray scribes with rolls. This amazing survival is partly the result of the dry climate of Egypt, in which some papyrus rolls survived unprotected for centuries while buried in the desert sands. The practice of certain Egyptian funerary customs also contributed to the preservation of many Egyptian books. Obsessed by a concern with life after death, they wrote magical formulas on coffins and on the walls of tombs to guide the dead safely to the gates of the Egyptian underworld. When the space thus provided became insufficient, they entombed papyrus rolls containing the texts. These mortuary texts are now described collectively as the Book of the Dead, although the Egyptians never standardized a uniform collection. Such books, when overlooked by grave robbers, survived in good condition in the tomb. Besides mortuary texts, Egyptian texts included scientific writings and a large number of myths, stories, and tales.

Quotations from ancient writings show that scribes were highly regarded in ancient Egypt. They were the priests and government officials employed in the temples, pyramid complexes, and the courts of the pharaohs. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that Egyptian embalmers did a thriving business in copies of the Book of the Dead.

Chinese books

The Chinese, though not so early as the Sumerians and the Egyptians, were the third people to produce books on an extensive scale. Although few surviving examples antedate the Christian Era, literary and archaeological evidence indicates that the Chinese had writing and probably books at least as early as 1300 bc. Those primitive books were made of wood or bamboo strips bound together with cords. Many such books were burned in 213 bc by the Ch’in emperor Shih Huang-ti, who feared the strength of the tradition they embodied. The fragility of materials and the damp climate resulted in the loss of other ancient copies. Some books escaped, however, and these, together with whatever books may have been produced in the intervening period, constituted a large enough body for a Chinese national bibliography to appear in the 1st century bc. This was prepared by a corps of specialists in medicine, military science, philosophy, poetry, divination, and astronomy. A classified list of works on tablets and on silk, it mentioned 677 books. With such a tradition, the survival of Chinese texts was assured by continuous copying and was not dependent on the capacity of a lone example to withstand the wear of the centuries.

Books in classical antiquity

Greek books

The Greeks adopted the papyrus roll and passed it on to the Romans. Although both Greeks and Romans used other writing materials (waxed wooden tablets, for example), the Greek and Roman words for book show identification with the Egyptian model. Greek biblos (“book”) can be compared with byblos (“papyrus”), while the Latin volumen (“book”) signified a roll. It has been suggested that papyrus was continuously in use in Greece from the 6th century bc, and evidence has been cited to indicate its use as early as 900 bc. Objects called books are mentioned by ancient Greek writers as having been in use in the 5th century bc. The oldest extant Greek rolls, however, date from the 4th century bc.

The 30,000 extant Greek papyri permit a generalized description of the Greek book. Rolled up, it stood about nine or 10 inches high and was an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. When the book was unrolled it displayed a text written in the Greek alphabet in columns about three inches wide separated by inch-wide margins. In spite of the Greek proficiency in decorative arts, few surviving books are illustrated. Such illustrations as have survived were of the practical sort found in later scientific books.

Practicality was a mark of the Greek book. The alphabet, although not invented by the Greeks, was adapted and stabilized by them as an instrument of verbal communication rather than of decorative purpose. Unlike the monumental Egyptian survivals in a decorative hand that sometimes exceeded 100 feet in length, Greek rolls seldom exceeded 35 feet in length and featured little embellishment. Such a roll was about as large as could be conveniently held in the hands to read, and it was big enough to contain a book of Thucydides or one of the longer New Testament Gospels. The average Greek book was shorter. Two books (here denoting a subdivision of a text) of Homer written in a later small hand fitted a 35-foot roll.

During the golden age of Athens in the 5th century bc, books were known and used but were lightly regarded as avenues of learning. Great tragedies and comedies, speeches, poems, histories, and lectures were produced, but all evidence indicates that the preferred method of publication at that time was oral. The actor, the orator, the rhapsodist, and the lecturer were supreme.

Given the interests and the scope of inquiry of Periclean Greeks, it is noteworthy that they had books and read them at all. Greek readers were general readers. Though it should not be assumed that all who lived in Athens could read, those who could included more than the narrow circle of scribes and scholars who were trained from youth to reverence books and to make a career of the difficult arts of reading and writing. The Greek alphabet reduced this difficulty, and the nonspecialized content of Greek books made them practical instruments of communication to a general public.

With the coming of Alexander the Great, the outlook of the Greeks was broadened into a universal attitude that was reflected in their use of books. As the Alexandrian kingdoms spread throughout the East, the Greeks were forced to extend their interest to alien peoples and the records of the past. Consequently, the range of matters worth discussing became too extensive for oral transmission and for the solitary speaker. In the important Hellenistic cities, most notably at Pergamum and Alexandria, centres of learning grew up; these aimed at a world synthesis of knowledge. (A noteworthy example of this synthesizing work was the Septuagint, which was a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.) Libraries were a distinguishing feature of these centres. The Museum and the Serapeum at Alexandria were reputed at various times to have from 200,000 to 700,000 rolls. The Ptolemies at Alexandria pursued a vigorous collecting policy in an attempt to acquire good copies of all important texts; and scholars were constantly at work on textual scholarship and the writing of new books. The book superseded the oral presentation as a primary means of publication. Greek writers even refer to the market in books and to prices paid for them. The discovery of surviving papyri in the rubbish heaps of provincial towns indicates that the trade was widely diffused. The large libraries maintained scriptoria in which extensive copying was done. However, survivals are scanty and there is no group of extant examples that bears such close resemblance to each other as to indicate that they were the product of the same scribe or scriptorium. Some surviving rolls bear the mark of professional work; others are amateurish.

The volume of surviving Greek texts is so slender that it arouses speculation about the nature of the large book collections of Alexandria. There are various explanations. First, the Alexandrians were doing textual criticism and required many copies of the same text to carry on the work. Second, the record indicates that the volume of Greek literature was much larger than what has survived, a majority of the texts having been lost. Literary and bibliographical references made by ancient writers and bibliographers indicate, for example, that the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes wrote among them about 330 plays; those surviving number 46. Nearly all of Greek lyric poetry has been lost. Only one-fourth of the texts by Stobaeus, an anthologist of the 5th century ad, survived to modern times.

The survival of Greek texts depended on copying by succeeding generations. No manuscript in the hand of either a Greek or Roman author is extant, and the earliest extant copies of most works date from centuries after the composition. In such circumstances, the greatest factor in survival was the widespread and continuing popularity of a work. The centres of textual criticism fostered the preservation of some texts by establishing a canon of writings to be taught in the schools. This practice proved to be more important for a work’s survival than the establishment of the great libraries, because the library collections were destroyed, while the widespread copying of books for use by students ensured that they were physically dispersed over a large area, thus rendering an author’s work less vulnerable to local disasters. Finally, the universal interest and application of the content was an important factor that led to the survival of some nonliterary texts through translation into Arabic, Latin, and other foreign languages.

Roman books

Rome was the channel through which the Greek book was introduced to the people of western Europe. When the Romans conquered Greece they carried home Greek libraries to serve as a foundation for similar libraries in Rome. Roman libraries had separate collections of Greek and Latin books; but except for the substitution of the Latin language for Greek, a Roman papyrus roll closely resembled a Greek one in content, and there was much imitation.

The Romans developed a book trade on a fairly large scale. From the time of the 1st-century-bc orator Cicero there is evidence of large scriptoria turning out copies of books for sale. On several occasions Cicero referred to bookshops; the 1st-century-ad poet Martial complained about professional copyists who became careless in their speed; and the 1st-century-ad naturalist Pliny the Elder described the extensive trade in papyrus. The trade decrees of the emperor Diocletian set regulations for determining a price for the copying of books.

Book ownership was widespread among Romans of the upper class. Private libraries were common and were considered the necessary badge of distinction for anyone who aspired to high position or social importance. On the other hand, books were also within reach of less prosperous people because the use of slave labour to multiply copies kept prices relatively low. From a comparative study of prices, it has been concluded that books were cheap enough for people with only moderate incomes to buy them. As many as 30 copies of a work might be made simultaneously by a reader dictating to slave copyists. In many ways these enterprises were prototypes for modern publishing houses. Roman publishers selected the manuscripts to be reproduced; advanced money to authors for rights to the manuscripts, thus assuming the risks of publication; chose the format, size, and price of each edition; and developed profitable markets for their merchandise.

Books in the early Christian era

The codex

The substitution of the codex for the roll was a revolutionary change in the form of the book. Instead of having leaves fastened together to extend in a long strip, the codex was constructed from folded leaves bound together on one side—either the right or the left, depending on the direction of writing. (Some variant forms were bound at the top of the leaves.) The codex enjoyed several advantages over the roll. A compact pile of pages could be opened instantly to any point in the text, eliminating the cumbersome unrolling and rerolling, and facilitating the binding of many more leaves in a single book. In addition, the codex made feasible writing on both sides of the leaf; this was not practical for the roll. Because of its compactness, its ease of opening, and its use of both sides of the leaf, the codex could conveniently contain longer texts. The difference can be illustrated with copies of the Bible. While the Gospel of Matthew reached the capacity of the roll, a common codex included the four Gospels and Acts bound together; and complete Bibles were not unknown.

The folded note tablets used by the Greeks and the Romans may have suggested the codex form, but its development to the point of eventual supremacy was related to changes in the world of learning and in the materials for making books. The change in the scholarly outlook came from the rise of Christianity; the new material was vellum or parchment.

Vellum and parchment

Vellum and parchment are materials prepared from the skins of animals. Strictly speaking, vellum is a finer quality of parchment prepared from calf skins, but the terms have been used interchangeably since the Middle Ages. The forerunner of parchment as a writing material was leather. Egyptian sources refer to documents written on leather as early as 2450 bc, and a fragmentary Egyptian leather roll of the 24th century bc survives; but leather was rarely used because papyrus was plentiful. The Hebrews also used leather for books. The spectacular discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s turned up collections of both leather and papyrus rolls that had been stored in earthen jars in caves along the Dead Sea for centuries. These liturgical and biblical books, produced by a Jewish ascetic sect, were written between the mid-2nd century bc and ad 68.

Parchment is a greatly refined form of leather. The skins of various animals—cattle, sheep, and goats being most common—are washed and divested of hair or wool. Then the skin is stretched tight on a frame, scraped thin to remove further traces of hair and flesh, whitened with chalk, and smoothed with pumice. Tradition has it that parchment was invented as the result of book-collecting rivalry between Ptolemy V of Egypt and Eumenes II of Pergamum about 190 bc. Fearing the library at Pergamum might outstrip the collections at Alexandria, Ptolemy placed an embargo on papyrus to prevent his rival from making any more books, whereupon Eumenes made parchment. The fact that both the Greek and Latin words for parchment mean “stuff from Pergamum” offers some support for the tradition.

Although parchment was used to produce book rolls, and although many early codices were made from papyrus, the new writing material facilitated the success of the codex. A sheet of parchment could be cut in a size larger than a sheet of papyrus; it was flexible and durable, and it could better receive writing on both sides. These qualities were important. In making a parchment or vellum codex, a large sheet was folded to form a folio of two leaves, a quaternion (quarto) of four, or even an octavo of eight. Gatherings were made from a number of these folded sheets, which were then stitched together to form a book. Because papyrus was more brittle and could not be made in large enough sheets, the folio collected in quires (i.e., loose sheets) was the limit of its usefulness. At the same time, because of the vertical alignment of the fibres on one side, papyrus was not well adapted for writing on both sides in a horizontal script.

For 400 years the roll and the codex existed side by side. There are contemporary references to the codex book dating from the 1st century bc; actual survivals date from the 2nd century ad, however. In the 4th century ad vellum or parchment as a material and the codex as a form became dominant, although there are later examples of rolls, and papyrus was occasionally used for official documents until the 10th century. There were similarities between the two forms; an example of the influence of the roll on the codex can be seen in the use of multiple columns on the pages of early codices, much like the columnar writing on the rolls.

Christianity and the book

In books surviving from the first four centuries ad, codices more often contained Christian writings, whereas pagan works were usually written on rolls. Several points in the Christian use of books contributed to a preference for vellum and the codex. First, Christianity was rooted in Judaism, which for centuries had revered sacred writings. The Christians retained the Jewish Scriptures and added some writings of their own, collected in a New Testament. There was strong motivation for preserving these unchanging words on the most durable materials, and vellum was more durable than papyrus. Second, in referring to their sacred writings the Christians made comparative studies of sources. The writings were related, and students liked to refer from one source to another. This reference entailed having a comparatively large volume of writings available and increased the attractiveness of the easy turning of pages possible with a codex. In this respect it is noteworthy that Roman legal scholarship, which also required a comparison of sources, likewise showed an early preference for the codex. A third point was the expressed intention of early Christians to shun pagan literature by using an entirely different form of book. Conversely the clinging of the pagan authors to an outmoded form may be ascribed in part to a conservative resistance to the Christian ideas.

The social potential of books was illustrated by the Christian emphasis on their dissemination. Christianity, which aimed at universality, produced a stream of books, whereas the literary remains of pagan religions are scarce. The process of introducing the universal religion throughout the Roman Empire extended over three centuries, covered thousands of miles, and embraced peoples of the most varied backgrounds and individuals of the greatest differences in rank. The worldwide outlook thus led to a greater dependence on books. Biblical texts and translations, commentaries, polemical tracts, and pamphlets were important in the circumstances, not only to record belief but also to disseminate and explain it.

By the 4th century, the same time that the vellum codex had superseded the papyrus roll, the Christian book had replaced the pagan book in every form. Little of importance was written in the classical tradition after ad 100. The greatest writers of the following three centuries were Christian scholars such as Origen, Pamphilus of Caesarea, Tertullian, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome. Of all Christian books, however, the most numerous survivals are New Testament codices and apocryphal New Testament writings.

The medieval book

The monasteries

The dissolution of the western Roman Empire during the 5th century, and the consequent dominance of marauding barbarians, threatened the existence of books. It was the church that withstood the assaults and remained as a stable agency to provide the security and interest in tradition without which books can be neither disseminated nor wholly enjoyed. Books found refuge in monasteries. The 6th-century Rule of St. Benedict enjoined monks to read books at certain times. The surrounding social chaos placed upon monasteries the responsibility for making books and creating libraries in order to implement the injunction. A more specific model was set by the historian and grammarian Cassiodorus, who, after serving the Ostrogothic kings in high positions, retired from public life in about 540 to found a monastery and establish a scriptorium at Vivarium. The scriptorium was the centre of his interest there. He supervised the copying of books and wrote a guide to learning, the Institutions of Divine and Human Readings. He also composed works that presented certain writers as models, discussed rules for editing, and suggested procedures for establishing a scriptorium and a library.

Following the early examples, monastic houses throughout the Middle Ages characteristically had libraries and scriptoria where monks copied books to add to their collections. Arrangements for this activity varied from place to place. Occasionally the scriptorium was a single large room. Sometimes the copying was done in carrels, individual cells built in the cloister or library. Fittings for the scriptoria were spare; they lacked heat and artificial light. Work was undertaken only during the daylight hours, because fear of fires that might result from artificial light prevented working after dark. The labour (if contemporary complaints can be believed) was hard, for it was often said, “Two fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils.” The scribe sat at a desk copying in silence a text that was spread before him. The monks did not follow the practice of the Roman commercial scriptorium where a reader dictated a book while several scribes made simultaneous copies of it. Instead, after the scribe’s work was finished it was proofread and titles and notes were inserted. The book might then be given to an illuminator, who supplied any needed illustrations or decorative devices. Finally, the book was bound. This procedure closely resembles that of modern book production, except that in the scriptoria each step in the preparation of a manuscript was repeated for each copy of a work. Book production was slowed to a trickle, and a monastic library with as many as 600 volumes was considered fairly large.

The medieval book was a codex written on vellum or parchment, although by the 15th century paper manuscripts were normal. Many medieval manuscripts attained a high perfection of colour and form and are renowned for their beauty. Such examples as the Book of Kells from Ireland, the Lindisfarne Gospels from England, and the many brilliant “books of hours” made in France are world-renowned as examples of art. The customary book was less splendid, however. Written in a neat book hand that developed into the models from which printing types were designed, the manuscript books of the Middle Ages were the models for the first printed books.

Because the monastic book trade was largely internal, the contents of books are evident from the monastic library catalogs. Generally the catalogs grouped the books in three divisions. First came the Bible and commentaries. Writings of the Church Fathers and contemporary theologians followed. Finally there was a smaller section of worldly books—including at various places some classics, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, law, and historical and philosophical writings. Scriptoria flourished throughout Europe. Books in the Greek language were found only in Byzantine monasteries; in western Europe books were written in Latin. Only with the onset of humanistic scholarship in the 14th century, and the rise of important vernacular writers at about the same time, did books in Greek and various vernacular languages assume any prominence in the catalogs of western European monasteries.

The revival of the secular book trade

For six centuries after Cassiodorus, references to book production outside monasteries are few and hard to interpret. A definite expansion in book production came with the rise of the universities in the 12th century and a revived interest in ancient Greek writings, although these were studied mainly in Latin translation. The universities were located in cities and generated a demand for books. University stationers were established to supply the demand; these were controlled by the universities, which framed regulations about the content and size of books and set prices for sale and for rental. The University of Vercelli in Piedmont, Italy, framed such a regulation in 1228, and many similar acts are recorded for other universities. To satisfy the growing demand, the university stationer, unlike the monastic scriptoria, produced multiple copies of works.

There can be no doubt that books were readily exposed for sale in the 14th century. This is evident in Philobiblon, a book finished in 1345 describing the book-collecting activities of Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham. The book relates how the bishop established good relations with stationers and booksellers in England, France, Germany, and Italy by sending advance payments. Evidence from the same century indicates that the stationers were organized in craft guilds in the same way that other trades were organized. A London record of 1357 granted exemption from jury service to writers of text hand (a compressed, angular hand used for the main text of a book). In 1403 the Stationers’ Company of London appealed to the city for the right to have their own ordinances.

Humanistic and vernacular books

The manuscript books of the 14th and 15th centuries were affected by the rise of humanism and the increased use of the vernacular languages. The emergence of humanism has long stood as a notable example of the capacity of the book to preserve knowledge through centuries of disinterest and neglect. In the first half of the 14th century the intellectually curious began seeking out texts of classical authors. Many texts were found in monastery libraries, and soon considerable enthusiasm for the style of writing and pagan contents of the classical works developed. Library collections throughout western Europe were searched with the aim of recovering and purifying the classical texts. The restored texts, often with humanistic commentaries, became prized books that were collected by whoever could afford them. The Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana Library in Florence, the modern Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and important collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale date from this time period. By 1450 most of the Latin classics had been recovered, and the humanists turned their attention to Greece, even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 caused the exodus of so many books and scholars from the Eastern capital.

Concurrently with the revived interest in classical literature and language came the production of vernacular books. A vernacular literature had long been growing; and anonymous medieval authors had composed poems and stories of first importance before the 14th century, but their transmission had been largely oral. In the 14th and 15th centuries vernacular books appeared. The anonymous classics were put in writing, and new books by such creative geniuses as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Villon appeared.

The expanded literary production found a much larger audience capable of participating in the use and enjoyment of books. Lay princes as well as churchmen promoted learning and were among the patrons of humanism, although the practicing humanists themselves were for the most part ecclesiastics. An increasing number of books were written in the vernacular, and there is evidence that tradesmen and artisans in the cities were learning to read and write. It was partly to them that John Wycliffe directed his English translation of the Bible.

During the 15th century the manuscript book came to resemble its successor, the printed book, in scope. In the wake of the humanists, the content of books expanded to embrace a large sphere of human activity. New authors wrote in the language of the people. Increasing numbers of people enjoyed the advantage of literacy. Books were recognized as objects in trade, and their production and sale were handled by guilds in the same way as other articles of commerce. Paper, which had come to Europe from China by way of Arab traders, was replacing vellum as the material for books. Creation of the printing press wanted only ingenuity and patience.

The age of early printing: 1450–1550

Before the invention of printing, the number of manuscript books in Europe could be counted in thousands. By 1500, after only 50 years of printing, there were more than 9,000,000 books. These figures indicate the impact of the press, the rapidity with which it spread, the need for an artificial script, and the vulnerability of written culture up to that time.

The printed books of this initial period, up to 1500, are known as incunabula; i.e., “swaddling clothes” or “cradle,” from a Latin phrase used in 1639 to describe the beginnings of typography. The dividing line, however, is artificial. The initial period of printing, a restless, highly competitive free-for-all, runs well into the 16th century. Printing began to settle down, to become regulated from within and controlled from without, only after about 1550. In this first 100 years, the printer dominated the book trade. The printer was often his own typefounder, editor, publisher, and bookseller; only papermaking and, usually, bookbinding were outside his province.

Early printer-publishers in Germany

Printing has been called the great German contribution to civilization; in its early days it was known as the German art. After its invention (about 1440–50) by a goldsmith of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, it was disseminated with missionary zeal—and a keen commercial sense—largely by Germans and largely along the trade routes of German merchants. Gutenberg himself is usually credited with what is known as the 42-line Bible (1455; see photograph); the 36-line Bible; and a popular encyclopaedia called the Catholicon (1460); however, he lost control of his assets in collection proceedings brought against him by his business partner in 1455. Gutenberg’s partner, Johann Fust, and his employee, Peter Schöffer (later Fust’s son-in-law), continued the business together after 1455; but Mainz itself never became a major centre of the book trade. It was soon challenged by Strassburg (Strasbourg) where, in 1460–61, Johann Mentelin, with an eye for the lay market, brought out a Bible compressed into fewer pages and followed this with the first printed Bible in German or any other vernacular. A few years later, Cologne had its first press (1464) and became an important centre of printing in the northwest. Cologne’s early production was almost entirely in Latin because of the heavy bias of its university toward orthodox Thomist theology. In the south, printing quickly spread to the other great trading centres, Basel (1466), Nürnberg (1470), and Augsburg (1472). Basel became famous for the scholarly editions of Johann Amerbach and Johann Froben, who had the benefit of distinguished advisers, including the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. In Augsburg, the first press was set up alongside the renowned scriptorium of the Abbey of SS. Ulrich and Afra; and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript was carried over into equally sumptuous editions of illustrated printed books. At Nürnberg, which soon took the lead in the book trade, Anton Koberger operated on a large, international scale. At his peak, he ran 24 presses and had links with Basel, Strassburg, Lyon, Paris, and many other cities. He could be called the first great businessman publisher and the first publisher to rise socially—to membership in the town council. By 1500 there were presses in some 60 German towns, including Lübeck (1475), the head of the Hanseatic League. From there, printing spread to Denmark, Sweden, Rostock, Danzig, and Russia, though the first printer who went to Russia was apparently murdered before he could achieve anything. Printing first began in Russia in 1552, with the help of a printer from Copenhagen.

Italy

It may be said that book printing, after its birth in medieval Germany, was carried to maturity in humanistic Italy. The printing press reached Italy very early (1462–63), via the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, near Rome, which had strong German connections and a famous scriptorium. Two German printers, Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who had settled there, soon moved to Rome (1467), where the church encouraged the production of inexpensive books. In Italy as in Germany, however, it was the great commercial towns that became centres of printing and publishing. By 1500, Venice had no fewer than 150 presses; and two Venetian printers exercised a decisive influence on the form of the book: Nicolas Jenson, an outstanding typographer who perfected the roman typeface in 1470, and Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer-publisher of his time. Aldus began printing in 1490 with a series of Greek texts. He then hit on the idea of bringing out inexpensive “pocket editions” for the new readers produced by the humanist movement. Beginning in 1501 and continuing with six titles a year for the next five years, he issued a series of Latin texts that were models of scholarship and elegance. To keep down the cost, Aldus printed editions of 1,000, instead of the more usual 250; and to fill the page economically, he used an italic type designed for him by Francesco Griffo. The Aldine editions were widely copied, by pirating (i.e., without permission from the publisher or payment to him) and other methods, and their dolphin and anchor was one of the first instances of a publisher’s device (roughly equivalent to the modern logo).

France

The way in which printing came to France is of special interest because it shows a publisher (rather than a printer-publisher) in command from the start. In Paris in 1470, the rector and librarian of the Sorbonne invited three German printers to set up a press on universitypremises. The scholars chose the books and supervised the printing, even to specifying the type. Their preference for roman type greatly helped the eventual defeat of black-letter, or Gothic, type. Among the early French printers were Jean Dupré, a businessman publisher of éditions de luxe (“luxury editions”), who set up in 1481, and Antoine Vérard, who began printing in 1485. Vérard was the first to print a Book of Hours, a book containing the prayers or offices appointed to be said at canonical hours, and his work set a standard of elegance for French book production. After 1500, when the full force of the Renaissance began to be felt in France, a brilliant group of scholarly printers, including Josse Bade, Geoffroy Tory, and the Estienne (Stephanus) family, who published without a break for five generations (1502–1674), carried France into the lead in European book production and consolidated the Aldine type of book—compact, inexpensive, and printed in roman and italic types. The golden age of French typography is usually placed in the reign of Francis I (1515–47), one of the few monarchs ever to take a keen personal interest in printing. He was the patron and friend of Robert Estienne. In 1538 he ordered Estienne to give a copy of every Greek book he printed to the royal library, thus founding the first copyright library. In 1539 he laid down a code for printers, which included a prohibition on the use of any device that could be confused with another. Outside Paris, the only significant centre of printing in France was Lyon. While Paris was under the watchful eye of the predominantly Roman Catholic theologians at the Sorbonne, Lyon was able to publish humanist and Protestant works more freely. Among its foremost printers were Johann Trechsel and his sons, Melchior and Caspar; Sebastian Greyff, or Gryphius; and a fine typographer, Robert Granjon. By about 1600, however, religious pressure and the competition of Paris had put an end to printing in Lyon. Thereafter, the French book trade was based entirely in Paris.

Other continental printers

Other parts of Europe established presses quickly; e.g., Utrecht (1470), Budapest (1473), and Cracow (1474), in each case through Germans. In Spain the German connection is particularly evident. The first Spanish press was set up in 1473 at Valencia, where the German trading company of Ravensburg had an important base. Though Madrid became dominant after 1566, publishing flourished in the early period at Barcelona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Sevilla (Seville), and the university towns of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Spain quickly evolved its own distinctive style of book, full of dignity and printed largely in black-letter types. The most remarkable production of the period was the magnificent Complutensian Polyglot Bible (which presented the text in several languages in adjacent columns), sponsored by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros “to revive the hitherto dormant study of the scriptures,” which it effectively did. It was printed at Alcalá de Henares, in Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, by Arnaldo Guillermo de Brocar, the first great Spanish printer. Editorial work was begun in 1502, the six volumes were printed in 1514–17, and the book finally was issued in 1521 or 1522. In Lisbon, the first printed book was a Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) produced in 1489 by Eliezer Toledano; he was reinforced in 1495 by two printers summoned by the Queen of Portugal. From Spain, printing crossed the Atlantic during this early period. In 1539 Juan Cromberger of Sevilla, whose father, Jacob, had set up a press there in 1502, secured the privilege for printing in Mexico and sent over one of his men, Juan Pablos. In that year, Pablos published the first printed book in the New World, Doctrina christiana en la lengua mexicana e castellana (“Christian Doctrine in the Mexican and Castilian Language”).

England

Compared with the Continent, England in the early days of printing was somewhat backward. Printing only reached England in 1476, and in 1500 there were still only five printers working in England, all in London and all foreigners. Type seems to have been largely imported from the Continent until about 1567, and paper until about 1589 (except for a brief spell during 1495–98). In an Act of 1484 to restrict aliens engaging in trade in England, Richard III deliberately exempted all aliens connected with the book trade in order to encourage its domestic development. In the following year, Henry VII appointed a foreigner, Peter Actors of Savoy, as royal stationer, with complete freedom to import books. For about 40 years, England was a profitable field for continental printers and their agents. This necessary free trade was brought to an end and native stationers protected under Henry VIII, whose acts of 1523, 1529, and 1534 imposed regulations on foreign craftsmen and finally prohibited the free importation of books. It has been estimated that up to 1535 two-thirds of those employed in the book trade in England were foreigners.

It is thus all the more remarkable that the man who introduced printing to England was a native, William Caxton. After learning to print at Cologne (1471–72), Caxton set up a press at Bruges (about 1474), where he had long been established in business. His first book, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was his own translation from the French, and its production was probably the main reason why this semiretired merchant gentleman took to printing at the age of 50. He then returned to England through the encouragement of Edward IV and continued to receive royal patronage under Richard III and Henry VII. Caxton is important not so much as a printer (he was not a very good one) but because from the first he published in English instead of Latin and so helped to shape the language at a time when it was still in flux. Of the 90-odd books he printed, 74 were in English, of which 22 were his own translations. Some, such as the Ordre of Chyvalry and the Fayttes of Armes, were for the pleasure of his royal patrons; but his range was wide and included Dictes and Sayenges of the Philosophers (1477; his first book in England); two editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the second undertaken because a better manuscript came to hand); The Fables of Aesop (in his own translation from the French); Sir Thomas Malory’sKyng Arthur; and his largest work, The Golden Legend, a compilation of such ecclesiastical lore as lives of the saints, homilies, and commentaries on church services, a considerable editorial labour apart from the printing.

Caxton’s press was carried on after his death by his assistant, Wynkyn de Worde of Alsace. In the absence of court connections and also because he was a shrewd businessman, he relied less on the production of expensive books for the rich and more on a wide variety of religious books, grammars and other schoolbooks, and collections of popular tales. He published more than 700 titles, mostly small volumes for the ordinary citizen, and continued Caxton’s standardizing of the language, a solid contribution to the native book trade. The best of the early printers was Richard Pynson of Normandy, who began printing in 1492 and became printer to the king in 1508. Pynson, the first to use roman type in England (1509), published the first English book on arithmetic (1522). After his early liturgies and some fine illustrated books, he concentrated mainly on legal works. In 1521 he published Henry VIII’s answer to Luther in defense of the papacy, for which the King received the title of fidei defensor (“defender of the faith”) from the Pope.

Printed illustrations

Although 15th-century printers characteristically were content to exploit the existing book format, their use of printed illustrations in fact produced a new means of expression. Printers used woodcuts to print illustrations by the relief process and experimented with intaglio in copper engravings. Woodcut pictures were produced before metal types, and it was a simple development to make woodcuts in appropriate dimensions for use with type to print illustrated books. Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg was printing books illustrated with woodcuts about 1461. Copper engravings, which were better able to produce fine lines, were especially suitable for the reproduction of maps; among the few incunabula illustrated with engravings is a Ptolemy Geographia printed at Rome by Arnoldus Buckinck in 1478. But because engravings required a different press and introduced a separate process into printing, and because experiments with woodcut illustrations were so satisfactory, there was no extensive use of engravings before 1550.

Once a picture was prepared for printing, it could be repeated an indefinite number of times with little loss in detail, accuracy, form, or original vigour. When great artists such as Albrecht Dürer designed woodcuts the result was books of high aesthetic value that could be produced in great numbers. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499, is a monument to the early perfection of the woodcut and to book illustration in general. Equally as important as the reproduction of great art was the opportunity that printed illustrations offered for the faithful reproduction of pictures and diagrams in scientific books. The dawning scientific scholarship profited from the development of printed illustration; it is significant that studies in both anatomy, with its need for precise illustration of the human body, and cartography greatly expanded after development of printed illustrations.

The book trade

The book trade during this early period showed enormous vitality and variety. Competition was fierce and unscrupulous. A printer of Parma in 1473, apologizing for careless work, explained that others were bringing out the same text, and so he had to rush it through the press “more quickly than asparagus could be cooked.” Though most of the early firms were small printer-publishers, many different arrangements were made and at least one businessman, Johann Rynmann of Augsburg, published nearly 200 books but printed none of them. Publishing companies, which both financed and guided the printing enterprise, were also tried, as at Milan in 1472 and at Perugia in 1475. Publishers were not slow to promote their books. The medieval scribes had placed their names, the date when they finished their labours, and perhaps a prayer or a note on the book, at the end of their codices. From this grew the printer’s colophon, or tailpiece, which gave the title of the book, the date and place of printing, the name and house device of the printer, and a bit of self-advertisement. By about 1480, the information of the colophon began to appear at the front of the book as a title page, along with the title itself and the name of the author. Advertisements for books, in the form of handbills or broadsheets, are known from about 1466 onward, including one of Caxton’s of 1477, ending with a polite request not to tear it down, Supplico stet cedula (“Please let the poster stand”). Publisher’s lists and catalogs occur almost as early. Distribution of books along the trade routes, with their courier services, appears to have been highly effective. In 1467, for instance, a bookseller in Riga on the Baltic coast had a stock of books issued by Schöffer in Mainz on the Rhine. Another effective channel for the distribution of books was the regular trade fairs, especially those at Frankfurt and at Stourbridge in England. Besides the stationers, who may sometimes have functioned as wholesalers, there were also retailers known as “book-carriers.”

Early publishing had a profound effect on national languages and literatures—it began at once to create, standardize, and preserve them. Caxton, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid, after telling a story of confused dialects, ended up “Lo! what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?” By choosing words “understood of common people” and by printing all he could of English literature, he steered the English language along its main line of development. The early printing of great vernacular works, such as those of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, or a vernacular Bible, such as that of Luther in Germany, gave many languages their standard modern form. The French language owes much to the early printer-publisher Robert Estienne, who is known not only for his typographical innovations of the 1530s but also for his dictionaries. His work in the latter field caused him to be known as the father of French lexicography. Up to 1500, about three-quarters of all printing was in Latin, but thereafter that proportion steadily declined as books appeared in the vernacular and reached an ever-widening public.

Controls over printing

The church at first had every reason to welcome printing. Bibles (preferably in Latin), missals, breviaries, and general ecclesiastical literature poured from the early presses of Europe; and the first best-seller in print was a devotional work by Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi (Imitation of Christ), which went through 99 editions between 1471 and 1500. Such sales were matched, however, between 1500 and 1520 by the works of the humanist Erasmus, and, after 1517, by those of the “heretic” Martin Luther. The church had always exercised censorship over written matter, especially through the universities in the late Middle Ages. As the works of the reformers swelled in volume and tone, this censorship became increasingly harsh. The Inquisition was restored, and it was decreed in 1543 that no book might be printed or sold without permission from the church. Lists of banned books were drawn up, and the first general Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) was issued in 1559. Dutch printers in particular suffered under the Inquisition and a number went to the stake for publishing Protestant books. To avoid such a fate, some resorted to the fake imprint, putting a fictitious printer or place of publication on the title page, or omitting that information.

Censorship also began to be exercised in varying degrees by individual rulers, especially in England, where church and state had been united under Henry VIII after his defection from Rome. The Tudors, with little right under common law, arrogated to themselves authority to control the press. After about 1525, endless proclamations were issued against heretical or seditious books. The most important was that of 1538 against “naughty printed books,” which made it necessary to secure a license from the Privy Council or other royal nominees for the printing or distribution of any book in English.

In this attempt at control, an increasingly prominent part came to be played by the Stationers’ Company. Since its formation in 1403 from the old fraternities of scriveners, limners, bookbinders, and stationers, it had sought to protect its members and regulate competition. Its first application for a royal charter in 1542 seems to have gone unheeded; but in 1557, an important date in the English book trade, the interests of the crown (then the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor), which wanted a ready instrument of control, coincided with those of the company (under a Roman Catholic first Master), and it was granted a charter that gave it a virtual monopoly. Thereafter, only those who were members of the company or who otherwise had special privileges or patents might print matter for sale in the kingdom. Under the system of royal privileges begun by Henry VIII, a printer was sometimes given the sole right to print and sell a particular book or class of books for a specified number of years, to enable him to recoup his outlay. This type of regulation now came into the hands of the Stationers’ Company. After licensing by the authorities, all books had to be entered in the company’s register, on payment of a small fee. The first stationer to enter a book acquired a right to the title or “copy” of it, which could then be transferred as might any other property. As the beginning of a system of copyright, this procedure was an admirable development; but the grip that the company obtained and its self-interested subservience to authority were to stunt the free growth of the English book trade for the next 100 years.

The flourishing book trade: 1550–1800

From the mid-16th through the 18th century, there were virtually no technical changes in the methods of book production, but the organization of the trade moved gradually toward its modern form. The key functions of publishing, selecting the material to be printed and bearing the financial risk of its production, shifted from the printer to the bookseller and from him to the publisher in his own right; the author, too, at last came into his own. The battle with the censor became increasingly fierce before any measure of freedom of the press was allowed. Literacy grew steadily and the book trade expanded, both within and beyond national boundaries.

Advances in continental Europe

The Netherlands

After 1550, the lead in book publishing passed for a time to the Netherlands. The business founded at Antwerp in 1549 by Christophe Plantin, a Frenchman by birth, came to dominate the Roman Catholic south of the country, both in quantity and in quality. Its finest production was probably the eight-volume polyglot Bible (1569–72), the Biblia regia (“Royal Bible”). The firm was carried on for generations by the descendants of Plantin’s son-in-law, Joannes Moretus (Jan Moerentorf). In the Protestant north, the house of Elzevir occupied a similar position. After its founding by Louis Elzevir, who issued his first book in 1593, its publishing endeavours were extended by succeeding generations to The Hague, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, with varying fortunes. A duodecimo (small-format) series of classical Latin texts that the Elzevirs began issuing in 1629 more than matched the earlier Aldine editions in excellence at a reasonable standard price. The Dutch, as great seafarers, were preeminent publishers of atlases, a word that was first used when the maps of Gerardus Mercator were published by his son, Rumold, in 1595. The high skill of Dutch engravers also went into their emblem books (books of symbolic pictures with accompanying verse), for which there was a considerable demand between 1580 and 1650.

France

In France, as the monarchy reasserted its authority after the wars of religion, publishing, which was already heavily concentrated in Paris, became increasingly centralized. In 1620, Louis XIII set up a private press in the Louvre, the Imprimerie Royale, which the Cardinal de Richelieu turned into a state establishment in 1640. This national press established and continued to maintain a standard of excellence for book production in France.

Louis XIII also tried to regulate the trade in books. By an ordinance of 1618, a body called the Chambre des Syndicats was established. It was organized along lines similar to the Stationers’ Company in England, but because it contained two royal nominees, its control was even more absolute. The power of censorship, though it remained for a time with the Sorbonne, also passed eventually to officials of the crown. Under these conditions, publishers were inclined to exercise caution; as in other strictly regulated areas, more controversial works first appeared outside the country (often in Holland or Geneva) or under a false imprint. But French books fully upheld the influence of French taste in Europe. The vernacular made strong inroads (even as the language of scholarship) when Descartes published his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method) in French in 1637. A remarkable publishing feat of the 18th century was the 70-volume collected edition of Voltaire’s works (1784–89) produced at Kehl, in Baden, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. Beaumarchais bought the printing equipment (especially for the purpose) from the widow of the great English typographer John Baskerville.

Germany

After the Reformation, the intellectual life of Germany was predominantly Protestant and the book trade almost entirely so. Through its book fairs, Frankfurt had become the centre of German publishing and even a kind of European clearinghouse. In 1579, however, the fair came under the supervision of the imperial censorship commission (Frankfurt being a free imperial city), and this action gradually killed it. After about 1650, though Frankfurt continued to be important for the production of type and illustrated books, the centre of the trade shifted decisively to Leipzig. There, an enlightened government and a celebrated university favoured cultural life and patronized book publishing. Two Leipzig firms dating from the 17th century survive to the present day: that founded by Johann Friedrich Gleditsch in 1694, which was taken over by the firm of F.A. Brockhaus in 1830, and that founded by Moritz Georg Weidmann in 1682. A Weidmann partner, Philipp Erasmus Reich, was known in the 18th century as “the prince of the German book trade.” He could be said to have invented the net price principle (see below Price regulation) and the idea of a booksellers’ association (1765), which in 1825 became the Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler, a unique organization of publishers, wholesalers, and retailers. Toward the end of the 18th century, three publishers were outstanding—Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig; Johann Friedrich Cotta in Tübingen and Stuttgart; and Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin, all of whom had a share in publishing Schiller and Goethe. Unger also published the magnificent translation of Shakespeare by August von Schlegel (8 vol., 1797–1810).

England

In the golden age of Elizabeth I, publishing in England was probably at its most turbulent. Through her Injunctions of 1559, Elizabeth confirmed the charter of the Stationers’ Company and the system of licensing by the crown or its nominees, which now included church dignitaries. Controls were tightened in 1586 by a decree of the Star Chamber, which confined printing to London, except for one press each in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Stationers’ Company was given powers to inspect printing offices and to seize and destroy offending material or presses, which it zealously did, as much in defense of its monopoly as in support of the crown. But despite stern measures, the great religious question, in which Elizabeth steered a precarious course between Papists and Puritans, continued to be fought out with secret presses on both sides.

Within the legitimate trade, the booksellers had begun to get the upper hand. The incorporation of the Stationers’ Company, like that of other London companies, was in itself an indication of the ascendancy of the trader over the craftsman. During the reign of Elizabeth, as part of a developing system of monopolies, the former short-term privileges for publishing certain works or classes of works (called “copies”) were granted, for a consideration, as life patents with rights of reversion, such as those enjoyed by Richard Tottel for law books or John Day for alphabet books and catechisms. The printers had already been driven by high costs to make arrangements with the booksellers, to their own disadvantage. Gradually, the very best copies came into the hands of a rich few, who ruled the company and who, in the words of a report of 1582, “keepe no printing howse, neither beare any charge of letter, or other furniture but onlie paye for the workmanship.” In 1577 an abortive revolt was led by John Wolfe, who maintained his right to print whatever he pleased. Wolfe was twice imprisoned, but he was finally bought off by admission to the Stationers’ Company. In 1584 to still the discontent, some of the rich patentees surrendered a number of copies to the company for the benefit of its poorer members. These were supplemented in 1603, when King James I withdrew some patents from individuals and sold them to the company, again for “the poore of the same.”

In this way the Stationers’ Company itself became a publishing organization; and having tasted the advantages, it bought up more and more copies on its own account. These came to be divided into “stocks,” the English Stock, Bible Stock, Irish Stock, Latin Stock, and Ballad Stock, with shares allocated among its members. By 1640, through leasing the patents at its discretion, the company controlled most of the printing offices in London. The benefit to the poor stationers was somewhat marginal and the monopoly and lack of foreign stimulus caused England to lag behind the Continent in standards of production.

For all that, the privileged men were sometimes good publishers; a few even supported authors during their labours. Some landmarks of the period were John Lyly’sEuphues, published by Gabriel Cawood (1578); Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, so important for Shakespeare, by Thomas Vautroullier (1579); Edmund Spenser’sFaerie Queene, by William Ponsonbie (1589–96), and the Authorised (or King James) Version of the Bible (1611), which was completed in a room at Stationers’ Hall and printed at the expense of Robert Barker, the king’s printer.

Publication of drama was left, along with much of the poetry and the popular literature, to publishers who were not members of the Stationers’ Company and to the outright pirates, who scrambled for what they could get and but for whom much would never have been printed. To join this fringe, the would-be publisher had only to get hold of a manuscript, by fair means or foul, enter it as his copy (or dispense with the formality), and have it printed. Just such a man was Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609); the mysterious “Mr. W.H.” in the dedication is thought by some to be the person who procured him his copy. The first Shakespeare play to be published (Titus Andronicus, 1594) was printed by a notorious pirate, John Danter, who also brought out, anonymously, a defective Romeo and Juliet (1597), largely from shorthand notes made during performance. Eighteen of the plays appeared in “good” and “bad” quartos before the great First Folio in 1623. A typical imprint of the time, of the “good” second quarto of Hamlet (1604), reads: “Printed by I.R. for N.L. and are to be sold at his shoppe under Saint Dunston’s Church in Fleetstreet”; i.e., printed by James Roberts for Nicholas Ling. For the First Folio, a large undertaking of more than 900 pages, a syndicate of five was formed, headed by Edward Blount and William Jaggard; the Folio was printed, none too well, by William’s son, Isaac.

Attempts to control the publishing business continued through most of the 17th century. In 1637 the Star Chamber issued its most drastic decree, which confirmed previous enactments, laid down detailed licensing procedures, reduced the total number of printers to 23, and prescribed severe penalties for offenses. Four years later, however, the Star Chamber itself was swept away by Parliament, and in the ensuing uncertainty the book trade had a taste of freedom. This new situation quickly alarmed not only the Stationers’ Company, which saw its privileges vanishing, but also Parliament, which proved to be as reactionary as the royalists. In 1643 it passed an ordinance restoring both licensing and the powers of the company. It was this act that prompted John Milton to write his Areopagitica, a noble and powerful plea for freedom of the press, which vigorously argued against every claim of justification for censorship. After the Restoration, the Licensing Act of 1662 was ruthlessly enforced until after the Great Plague of 1664–65, when its rigours were mitigated; it lapsed in 1679. James II revived licensing in 1685, but Parliament refused to renew it in 1694. Thereafter, restraint, harassment, and persecution continued, but by other means, under a broad interpretation of the meaning of libel. With the end of licensing and the gradual breakdown of the whole guild system, the Stationers’ Company declined in importance; but it remained useful in connection with copyright.

In the latter part of the 17th century, publishing expanded rapidly, partly through the rise of the periodical press (see below Magazine publishing), with its growing body of writers and readers. Successful books became highly profitable, and the author’s right to a proper share was more widely recognized. The poet John Dryden is said to have received a total of £1,200 for his Virgil (1697), at a time when a shopkeeper might receive £50 a year and a labourer £15. Patronage continued, with all its political implications; but dedications became increasingly cut-and-dried, costing five guineas for a poem, perhaps, or 20 for a play; royalty was naturally expected to pay more. By the 1750s it was virtually at an end; “We have done with patronage,” said Dr. Johnson. In its place came the public at large, to whom Henry Fielding dedicated his satirical piece for the theatre, The Historical Register for the Year 1736, on its publication in the following year. In the expanding literary market, the enterprising publisher tried to collect all the most promising authors to write for him. Through his personal inclinations, his sense of public taste, and his readiness to risk novelty, he began to play a part of his own in the course of literary development. As this side of the business absorbed more and more of his energies, the final separation of publisher and bookseller came about, though never so decisively as that between bookseller and printer.

In Britain this transition was marked—and fostered—by the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709, the first of its kind in any country. It was “An Act for the encouragement of Learning, by vesting the copies of printed books in the authors or purchasers of such copies during the times therein mentioned.” For books printed before the act, the time was 21 years, “and no longer” (from April 10, 1710, when the act came into force). For works not yet published, the copyright was 14 years, “and no longer,” though if the author was still living at the end of that time period, the copyright returned to him for a further period of 14 years. Penalties were also laid down, and registration at Stationers’ Hall was made a condition for their enforcement.

The Copyright Act of 1709, like all subsequent measures, tried to strike a balance between the needs of those who make a living from books—writers, printers, and publishers—and the interests of the reading public, which are far from identical; it tried, in other words, to limit privilege as well as piracy. The terms it set were amended when they came to be regarded as too short; but in setting any term at all, and in focusing attention on the author as prime producer, it was revolutionary.

The fathers of modern publishing in Britain, which may be said to date from this time, were Jacob Tonson, who acquired the copyright of Milton’s Paradise Lost and published works by Dryden, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope, among others; and Barnaby Bernard Lintot, who also published Pope, paying him some £5,300 in all for his verse translation of the Iliad. Charles Rivington began publishing in 1711, and Longmans, Green & Co. was begun in 1724 by Thomas Longman when he bought the business of William Taylor, the publisher of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. At mid-century the best-known figure in the trade was Robert Dodsley, the footman-poet who was befriended by Pope. Among “his” authors were Pope himself, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, and Samuel Johnson. He is credited with suggesting the idea of the Dictionary to Dr. Johnson, and his name heads the list of “gentlemen partners” who financed it. Such cooperative associations were popular as a means of financing longer works. They were known as congers and developed into a system of shares in individual books, which could be bought and sold at will.

America

During the 18th century, the book trade in the American colonies began to flourish. Printing had begun there in 1639, when the first printers, Stephen Day (also spelled Daye) and his two sons, left Cambridge, Eng., for Cambridge, Mass. After printing The Oath of a Free-Man (1638) and An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1639, the Days produced their first book, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, in 1640. In the early years of the Colonies, Cambridge, Mass., had the sole privilege of printing, but the monopoly was broken in 1674, when Marmaduke Johnson, who had come over to print an Indian Bible (1663), moved his press to Boston. Gradually others followed—Philadelphia had a press in 1685; New York City, in 1693. It was difficult for the colonial printer, as for any small printer, to produce large works because of a shortage of type; but patronage by the government helped to give his products a dignified style. Almanacs, primers, and law books were the staples of book production; works of theology formed the leading category. Until 1769 American printers bought their presses from England, but thereafter they acquired their equipment and supplies, including ink and paper, domestically. Books were sold in various ways—by subscription, by the printer himself, by hawkers, and through shopkeepers. Though Massachusetts passed a law against hawkers in 1713, it carefully excluded book peddlers, who had a valuable function in rural areas. The first bookseller seems to have been Hezekiah Usher of Boston, who added books to his general merchandise in about 1647.

Spread of education and literacy

The great increase in available reading matter after about 1650 both resulted from and promoted the spread of education to the middle classes, especially to women. The wider readership is reflected among the middle classes by the rich development of the prose novel in the 18th century and, among the less well-to-do, by the large sales of almanacs and chapbooks. The almanacs, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (Philadelphia, 1732–64), usually consisted of miscellaneous information and homiletic matter (collections of religious and moral sayings), while the chapbooks, consisting of a few pages cheaply produced, contained a popular story or ballad illustrated by a crude woodcut; a well-known example is The famous and remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London (1656).

Growth of libraries

Growth in the book trade led naturally to growth in libraries. Some of the oldest collections of books developed into national “copyright libraries,” of immense value for bibliographical purposes. Sir Thomas Bodley opened his famous library at Oxford in 1602, and in 1610 the Stationers’ Company undertook to give it a copy of every book printed in England. Later, Acts of Parliament required the delivery of copies of every book to a varying number of libraries, the most important being the library of the British Museum, founded in 1759. This idea of a definitive collection was adopted elsewhere; e.g., in the United States, where the Librarian of the Library of Congress (founded in 1800) was appointed copyright officer in 1870.

In the 18th century a characteristic development was the commercial lending library, and in the 19th the free public library. Despite the fears of publishers and booksellers that the availability of books in library collections would discourage people from purchasing copies for their own use, circulating libraries have promoted rather than diminished the sale of books, besides being a steady market in themselves.

Decline of censorship

From the 18th century censorship in most Western countries diminished. It was abolished in Sweden in 1766, in Denmark in 1770, and in Germany in 1848. The clearest statement, to which lip service, at least, is now almost universally paid, came from the French National Assembly in 1789: “The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely.” In the United States, no formal censorship has ever been established; control over printed matter has always been exercised through the courts under the law of libel. This was also the case in Britain after the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1694; but two important steps had yet to be taken: in 1766, Parliament put an end to general warrants (i.e., for the arrest of unnamed persons and for the seizure of unspecified papers); and in 1792, Charles James Fox’sLibel Act finally gave the jury the right to decide the issue, which had previously depended mainly on the judge. Subsequent efforts to suppress printed matter have centred on questions of libel, obscenity, or national security.

Modern publishing: from the 19th century to the present

The 19th century

In the 19th century a whole new era in publishing began. A series of technical developments, in the book trade as in other industries, dramatically raised output and lowered costs. Stereotyping, the iron press, the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations—these inventions, developed through the century and often resisted by the printer, amounted to a revolution in book production. Paper, made by hand up to 1800, formed more than 20 percent of the cost of a book in 1740; by 1910 it had fallen to a little more than 7 percent. Bindings, too, became less expensive. After 1820 cloth cases began to be used in place of leather, and increasingly the publisher issued his books already bound. Previously, he had done so only with less expensive books; the bindings of others had been left to the bookseller or private buyer. In Europe and America, expansion and competition were the essence of the century, and the book trade had a full share of both. While the population of Europe doubled, that of the United States increased fifteenfold. Improved means of communication led to wider distribution, and a thirst for self-improvement and entertainment greatly expanded readership, leading to a rapid growth in every category of book from the scholarly to the juvenile. The interplay of technical innovation and social change was never closer. As the development of the railways encouraged people to travel, a demand arose for reading material to lessen the tedium of the long journeys. The only victim in the book trade was design, part of the price that was paid almost universally in the first phase of machine production.

Publishing was now well established, with its characteristic blend of commerce and idealism. Their tendency to specialize made French and German publishers more vulnerable to change than their British colleagues, who aimed as a rule at greater flexibility. Literary and intellectual currents were flowing strongly and the number of new books rose by leaps and bounds. Rough figures for Britain indicate 100 new titles per year up to about 1750, rising to 600 by 1825, and to 6,000 before the end of the century. Equally characteristic was the appearance of popular series at low prices, “literature for the millions,” as Archibald Constable was the first to call it. The forerunner was the publisher John Bell’sThe Poets of Great Britain (rivaling Dr. Johnson’s), which appeared in 1777–83, in 109 volumes at six shillings each, when even a slim volume usually cost a guinea or more.

By the 1850s the application of the new techniques of mass production had brought down the price of an inexpensive reprint to one shilling, as in the Railway Library of novels (George Routledge, 1,300 vol., 1848–98), for instance, or in the three series of classics issued by H.G. Bohn in 1846, 1850, and 1853. Later reprints were cheaper still. Least expensive was Cassell’s National Library (209 vol., 1886–90), bound in paper for threepence and in cloth for sixpence—that is, one-twelfth the price of the Bell set. On the Continent, two German series were outstanding. The Tauchnitz Collection of British and American Authors (1841–1939) became known to thousands of travelers. Tauchnitz voluntarily paid royalties and forbade the sale of his editions in Britain. Even more successful was Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, begun in 1867. An important factor in this series, as in others later, was the release of works through the expiration of copyright.

Book piracy

In the United States, publishing gradually became centralized in a few cities—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. Although American literature put down strong roots during the 19th century, piracy from Britain rose to great heights. There was sharp competition to be the first to secure proofs of any important new book. Publishers waiting at the dockside for new British books could produce an American edition almost within hours, as they did in 1823 with Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak. In the absence of international copyright agreements, the British author usually received nothing, but there were honourable exceptions; Harper Brothers, for instance, paid considerable royalties to Charles Dickens and Thomas Macaulay, among others. There was also at least one famous case of piracy in reverse. When Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in the United States in 1852, 1,500,000 copies rapidly appeared in England, some editions selling for sixpence. Though it can be argued by some people that piracy is not only inevitable but possibly even desirable for the sake of cultural diffusion in some circumstances, the availability of inexpensive foreign books, if prolonged as it almost certainly was in the United States, can damage the prospects for home-produced literature. Though there were some household names, such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American writers in general had a lean time; and the strong development of the magazine short story and the lecture tour in the United States has been attributed in part to their difficulties. Toward the end of the century American publishing was further enriched by translations of many foreign works, as a result of the flood of immigrants into New York City.

Price regulation

While 19th-century publishing was competitive and individualistic, its growing volume pointed increasingly to the need for greater organization. A major problem, once booksellers had become distinct from publishers, was suicidal price-cutting in the retail trade. Though price regulation ran counter to accepted notions of free competition and met with fierce opposition, in the general interest of the industry it was inevitable. Like copyright, it helped to provide a firm structure within which fair prices could be calculated. The net price principle, first raised in the previous century by the German publisher Reich, was adopted in Germany in 1887 through the work of the Börsenverein, the trade organization founded in 1825. Under this principle, the publisher allows a trade discount to the bookseller only on condition that the book is sold to the public at not less than its “net published price” as fixed by the publisher. In England, a first attempt to introduce the net price principle by the booksellers in the 1850s was condemned to failure by the Free Traders; but toward the end of the century some publishers, led by Alexander Macmillan, began to replace the variable discounts by fixed prices. To press for the new system, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1895, and the Publishers Association was created in 1896. These two organizations then worked out the Net Book Agreement (1901), primarily through the efforts of Frederick (later Sir Frederick) Macmillan. The principle has since been generally adopted, although only to a limited extent in the United States. At roughly the same time, the founding of the Society of Authors (1884) in England and the Authors’ League (1912) in the United States helped to standardize fair dealing over contracts and the payment of royalties to authors.

Trade catalogs

The trade also became better organized in the provision of comprehensive catalogs of current books. These began as early as the twice-yearly book fairs at Frankfurt (first catalog 1564) and Leipzig (first catalog 1594). So great was the value of the Frankfurt catalog that an English edition was published in 1617–28. Eventually, all such semiprivate ventures, as A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in the United States (1804) or English catalogs deriving from The Publishers’ Circular (1837) or Whitaker’s (1874), became national lists, such as the Bibliographie de la France (from 1811), the U.S. Cumulative Book List (from 1898), the Deutsche National-bibliographie (from 1931), and the British National Bibliography (from 1950).

Development of copyright law

Copyright, too, underwent considerable development. By the end of the century, most countries had some provision, and various terms of protection were tried, running from publication or from the date of the author’s death. The United States first enacted legislation in 1790, France in 1793, and Germany in 1839. Moves toward an international code began in 1828 in Denmark. They took the form of reciprocal treaty arrangements between individual countries by which foreign authors received the same protection as did native authors. Britain joined the movement in several arrangements between 1844 and 1886. In 1885 a uniform international system of copyright was initiated by the Berne Convention. The customary term of protection is the author’s lifetime plus 50 years. Most countries subscribed to the Convention, but not the United States or Russia. The United States continued to protect its domestic printing industry up to 1955, when it joined the Universal Copyright Convention (Unesco 1952). While the Berne Convention prescribed a minimum level of protection, the Universal Convention was based on the concept of “national treatment”—each member country treating works by citizens of other member countries as it would those of its own citizens. Thus the United States was able to enter into an international agreement without the necessity of immediately revising its own copyright law. Since the Universal Convention contained a provision that the Convention would not be applicable between any two countries that belonged to the Berne Union, it served primarily as a treaty between the United States and the countries that recognized international copyright. The Soviet Union became a party to the Berne Convention in 1973.

The early 20th century

In the 20th century, the effects of state education in the more advanced countries became increasingly apparent. Standards of living rose, and, as in earlier times, these two conditions brought increased use and publication of books. During the late 1890s and early 1900s, many new publishing houses were founded. In the industrialized countries, though wages were rising, a small business could be staffed economically, and printing costs were such that it was economically feasible to print as few as 1,000 copies of a new book. It was thus comparatively easy to make a start, especially because the long-term credit that printers were prepared to grant made a minimum of capital necessary.

Book publishing grew to a substantial industry, consisting mostly of small units in the Western world but also embracing a number of large concerns, many of which were public corporations employing staffs of 1,000 or more. Specialization became frequent, particularly in educational books, as the needs of the new school populations were realized. Some companies, such as Macmillan, in both its British and American houses, had begun to issue schoolbooks almost by chance; then, as their sales grew most profitably, they developed separate departments for school and college textbooks. Others, such as The American Book Company and Methuen in London, had begun specifically with educational books in mind. For more than one leading London firm, India, despite its high illiteracy rate, began to grow strongly as a market and to repay the care and expense involved in setting up separate Indian branches.

The first literary agents

A new factor at this time, which was to change the financial climate for fiction publishers in particular, was the advent of the literary agent. The first agent began business in 1875, and between 1900 and 1914 many more appeared. Reasonable though it was that authors who were unable themselves to handle their business with publishers satisfactorily should employ a professional to bargain for them, the higher rates of royalty and larger advance payments thus secured cut seriously into a publisher’s profit. The increased cost made it considerably more difficult to finance the most speculative part of the business, the encouragement of new talent. The system of literary agents began in Britain but spread rapidly to the United States and also to the Continent, though in the latter it did not assume so great an importance. Keenly resented at first, the literary agent, by pressing for higher payment to authors he represented, may have been indirectly responsible for the greater selling efforts that some publishers began to make early in the century.

Sales methods

The discreet sales methods of the 19th century, whereby the sales representative merely showed his samples and the publisher took small spaces in newspapers for the bare announcement of title and author of his new books, were replaced by more forceful techniques. In this effort American publishers took a prominent part. Less hampered by inhibitions over the more blatant forms of salesmanship than their European colleagues, publishing houses in New York City began to take large advertisements, make extravagant claims for the qualities of their books, and thus build up bigger sales for new books than was customary in other countries. The existence of a prosperous middle class with fast-growing incomes was one factor; the vast spread of the population across the continent was another. These factors, combined with the development of the railroad, led to the successful development of mail-order advertising and selling. The sale of books, such as works of reference, by subscription was another technique that rapidly developed and grew into a business worth millions of dollars in the United States and elsewhere. It involved securing an undertaking to buy on installments over many months an already published set of books; it could also be used to secure advance orders for an expensive work, probably in several volumes, that the publisher was planning to issue, as was sometimes done in the 18th century. Continental countries also exploited the method, and considerable use was made of the door-to-door canvasser.

Effects of World War I

The coming of war in 1914 naturally had a disrupting, though not wholly destructive, effect upon book publishing in European countries. Shortage of paper necessitated rationing to two-thirds of prewar consumption in the case of Britain, while from hundreds of thousands of those in the armed forces came a tremendous demand for light reading. Although at one time the cost of paper rose to eight times its prewar level, sales of books increased sharply. The extra quantities could be supplied only at the expense of quality, and the standards of paper and binding were appalling. It would have been disastrous for a publisher to be left with large stocks of these books since paper supplies quickly returned to normal after the war, and the poorly produced books became unsalable. Of continental countries, Germany suffered the worst shortages, though the principal publishers were able to stay in business; in many respects a worse ordeal awaited them in the postwar inflation. In Britain, there was reluctance to recognize books as of any special importance to the national effort; virtually no direct use of them was made by the government, and it was not until the last four months of the war that a small proportion of publishers’ staffs were granted any relief from compulsory national service.

An immediate aftereffect of the war in Europe was a sharp reduction in the purchasing power of the middle class. Whereas before, in most European countries, a proportion of the educated and professional classes bought new books regularly, high taxation, inflation, and trade depression in the postwar years cut down on spare money. Those publishers who continued to cater only to that public found it increasingly difficult to trade profitably, and many went out of business or were absorbed into larger firms. In the United States, on the other hand, boom conditions in the postwar years produced a still more prosperous and enlarged middle class ready to absorb an increasing supply of books. The number of publishing houses grew; and more American authors, such as Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, found a world market. British and continental publishers turned more readily than before to New York City in search of fresh talent. Universities also increased in number more rapidly in the United States than elsewhere, producing a larger demand for college textbooks. Publishing them became an immensely important part of the business for many U.S. firms, which in some cases depended upon their profitable college departments to finance other parts of their operation, such as the fiction side.

The book club

A new development of vast potential at this time was the book club, an association of members who undertook to purchase, usually each month, a book selected for them by a committee, the advantage being that the book in question was supplied at a lower price than that at which it could be bought in a bookshop. The scheme, of which an early forerunner was the Swiss Co-operative Movement in about 1900, had obvious attractions for the part of the reading public that had no direct access to a bookseller. The pioneer Book-of-the-Month Club in America (1926) developed a membership that ran into hundreds of thousands, followed by The Literary Guild, its great rival, and specialized book clubs that covered a variety of special reader interests. These clubs were strongly opposed at first by both publishers and booksellers, who disliked the additional emphasis placed upon the potential best-seller, but they came to supply a genuine need. They also helped to offset the enormous amount of book borrowing from libraries. From the 1950s onward, however, their popularity was somewhat affected by the availability of inexpensive paperbound books sold in thousands of outlets outside the regular book channels.

Design standards

As noted above, machine production had lowered standards of design. The English designer William Morris and his Kelmscott Press, however, had begun to work for better typography and book design in the 1890s; and his example had led to the establishment of other private presses, such as The Doves Press and the Ashendene Press, which produced editions (usually limited) of exceptional beauty, printed on handmade paper. Though aimed essentially at the collector and issued at high prices, such books began to influence the more discerning publisher; and by the 1920s a few firms, such as Alfred Knopf in New York City, Chatto and Windus and Jonathan Cape in London, and the Insel Verlag in Leipzig, were seen to be far ahead of their competitors in their standards of design. With careful planning, skillful selection of typeface, and provision of layouts to guide the printer, more and more publishers managed to achieve typographically handsome books at a commercial price. These efforts were part of the Design in Industry movement, which sought to demonstrate that mass production need not preclude beauty. It should be noted, however, that responsibility for design was passing from the printer to the publisher; as the former, with the growth of his business, became more the industrialist and less the craftsman, the latter realized that he must himself take charge of this aspect of the book.

The Great Depression

The great trade slump that began in October 1929 brought a swift decline in the prosperity of American publishing. By 1931 British publishers could no longer depend upon selling a high proportion of their books to the United States, either in the form of physical copies or by way of a contract conceding the U.S. rights. Though the book trade of Europe proved a little more resilient than some other industries, it passed through a difficult period. Sales declined, profits were negligible, and there were many bankruptcies. Attempts were made to find new outlets for books and fresh ways to attract the public to them. In London an annual Book Exhibition was run by The Sunday Times from 1933 to 1938; and The New York Times tried a similar venture in its city. The Germans continued to hold their annual Book Fair in Leipzig, but this was primarily a trade function. Some British newspapers, striving for higher circulation, approached publishers to supply them with huge numbers of their popular books, specially printed, to be given away or sold very cheaply in exchange for coupons from the papers. Booksellers resented the practice, but for hard-pressed publishers it was financially attractive. In the rather desperate climate of the times, some publishers also spent inordinate amounts on newspaper advertising. Reprint book clubs proliferated too, again to the benefit of the few publishers and authors fortunate enough to secure a choice. In 1932 a valuable innovation that stimulated sales was the Book Token, a form of gift certificate. The invention of an English publisher, Harold Raymond, the Book Token could be exchanged for a book of specified value at any participating bookshop. It was at first opposed by many booksellers; but it went on to become a major factor in Christmas sales, and the system was adopted in other countries and by other trades.

Even in the depressed conditions, publishers still dreamed of tapping a wider readership. This began to become a reality in 1935, when Allen Lane launched his pioneer Penguin series of paperbacks. It was a risky operation, involving speculatively high initial printings to keep down the unit cost. But, despite the strongly held belief that paperbacks would not appeal outside the Continent, where they had sold freely, and the resistance of booksellers, who feared a sharp reduction in their receipts, the new series quickly caught on. They represented remarkable value at the original price of sixpence, equivalent to the cost of a small item in a variety store. Though printed on cheap paper, the books employed good typography—far superior to that of any earlier attempts at paperbacks—and the original cover design was attractive in the bold simplicity of its orange and white stripes. A U.S. agency was arranged shortly before World War II and was later taken over by Victor Weybright, who subsequently established the highly successful New American Library for the mass promotion of paperbacks in the world market.

Nazi persecution of the Jews in the immediate prewar years and the impact of the war itself caused a wave of emigration, from Germany and Austria in particular, which brought fresh publishing talent to both Britain and the United States as well as to other countries, including Australia. Some of the striking developments in the production of art books, with beautiful coloured illustrations, were a direct result of this movement, which bore its fullest fruit after the war.

World War II and the postwar period

The war that in 1939 European publishers had feared would utterly destroy their business proved in many respects less terrible in its effects on books than had been imagined. While the destruction of buildings, plants, and vast stocks of books, most notably in London and later in Leipzig, brought publishing to a standstill for individual firms, the activity as a whole continued. As in 1914 but to an even greater extent, the demand for reading matter for both instruction and entertainment grew enormously. The nature of the war, with its long periods of waiting alternating with intense bouts of frenzied activity, both induced the need and provided the opportunity for reading. As a result, book sales in the “free” countries rose to fresh heights. The occupied countries of Europe endured censorship and a tight control of materials; but most publishers survived and were swift to renew contacts with colleagues in London and New York City immediately after the war.

In the United States, though they were subject to some shortages and inconvenience, publishers were comparatively untouched by the war, and their business expanded rapidly. In Britain, however, because of the acute pressure on shipping, the importation of esparto grass, an essential ingredient for good book papers, was strictly limited, and a publisher’s paper ration was reduced to 37 1/2 percent of his prewar annual consumption. By closer setting of type and the use of much thinner paper, the ration was stretched to produce the maximum number of copies, but the final appearance of British books inevitably suffered, and they began to compare very unfavourably with those produced in the United States.

In countries that suffered severe paper shortage there was, of course, a sharp reduction in the number of new books and in the size of editions; consequently, with the increase in demand, the available books were rapidly sold out. The result was an enormous, if illusory, increase of profitability for publishers; and despite heavy wartime taxation they found themselves in far better shape financially than ever before. Instead of holding large and often very slow-selling stocks with insufficient cash resources, publishers had little stock but ample cash. There was, too, the marginal advantage that those new authors who were able to secure publication in the war years could be virtually certain that their books would be quickly sold out. In these artificial conditions, many publishers were more prepared to risk the work of an untried author. Against this, however, was the very serious shortage of standard works of every kind, including classics and educational and reference books; at one time the cry went up that “Shakespeare is out of print!” While a small extra tonnage of paper was released in Britain in 1942 for the reprinting of books that were considered “nationally important” in wartime, no one could possibly pretend that there was not a real book famine in most European countries. After the war it took about five years for paper to become reasonably plentiful again. Despite the disruption brought by the war, however, interest in books had increased enormously, and sales were furthered by the total disappearance or severe rationing in most of the warring countries of so many consumer articles that normally compete with books. Contrary to the fears of many publishers, a new reading public was emerging, and it was not lost in the postwar world.

The postwar period

After the end of the war, there was an awkward year or so of reorganization and anticlimax, when many wartime publications suddenly became unsalable; but then publishing, in almost every country, once more expanded rapidly. People who had been cut off entirely from the rest of the world displayed an immense hunger for the books that had appeared during the previous six years. Much new business developed in the sale of the actual books and in translation rights. Such conditions continued at a higher level than they had attained in the 1930s, and they were to be further stimulated with the rise of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Social change came to many countries, bringing a broader spread of purchasing power and above all wider educational opportunity for much of the population. The change was to set book publishing upon a bolder and more adventurous course, turning it from a minor industry into one of sufficient growth and profitability to attract professional investors.

A feature of the early postwar years was the remarkable phoenixlike rise of the German book trade, literally from the ashes of the Allied air raids, which had destroyed the principal cities with their publishing offices and printing works. Because Leipzig was in the Soviet-controlled zone of Germany, however, the centre of the trade moved to Frankfurt for the first time since about 1650. As part of its drive to become the commercial capital of West Germany, Frankfurt developed its exhibition facilities rapidly. Thus, the book trade fair had ideal conditions in which to thrive. Before 1939 it had been largely a domestic affair at which German publishers displayed their new works to booksellers, with only a small number of foreign publishers participating and those almost entirely continental; but it steadily grew to be the greatest meeting place for publishers from throughout the world.

In the nations that formed the Soviet bloc following World War II, publishing was subjected to a state control similar to that initiated in Soviet Russia in 1917. Very few of the famous publishing houses of Poland and Czechoslovakia survived, and the houses that did survive came under the ownership and control of the state. The normal pattern was for all books on a particular group of subjects to be issued from one publishing house. Thus in Hungary, for example, the principal houses dealt with science, political history, agriculture, music, belles lettres, or military or technical subjects. The organization in Romania was similar; but in East Germany it was significant that many of the prewar firms remained, though all were subject to government control.

Besides the economic and social changes that favoured publishing after 1945, an outburst of knowledge, particularly in science and technology, produced many new subjects, many of them highly specialized, all of which called for new books. The many new universities and colleges of technology that sprang up throughout the world formed a strong market for the thousands of college books that came to make up such a large part of many a publisher’s list. At the same time, there was a major advance in printing, a break away from the traditional letterpress system dependent upon lead type. Photocomposition (composing of printed matter by photographic means rather than by hand), coupled with offset printing technique, obviated much of the handwork of the earlier methods, improved working speeds, and prevented costs from rising as steeply as they would otherwise have done. The trend was toward giant machines for mass production, giving a favourable price for cases in which 100,000 or more copies were needed. Such giant machines became essential for the printing of paperbacks, but the problem remained of printing economically those “short runs” of 3,000 or so in which the works of new authors, from whom many of the important books of the future must come, are normally tried out.

The paperback revolution

By the early 1950s the paperback revolution was well under way. Growing from the prewar Penguins and spreading to many other firms, paperbacks began to proliferate into well-printed, inexpensive books on every conceivable subject, including a wide range of first-class literature. Generally known as pocket books on the Continent, they swept the world, converting book borrowers into buyers and creating new book readers on a scale never known before. Their use has been particularly widespread in the developing countries, notably those of Africa. The new paperbacks had remarkable ubiquity, being found not only in bookshops but also in drugstores, street kiosks, and newsstands in railway stations, airports, and hotel lobbies. The low price of the paperback, which moved books for the first time into the area of impulse buying, is due essentially to the large number printed, seldom fewer than 30,000 and frequently far more, and not, as is often supposed, to the use of paper instead of a hard cover for the binding.

By far the greater number of paperbacks have been reprints of books that have had some success in their original clothbound form. Normally the paperback publisher makes an offer to buy the paperback rights from the publisher of the hardcover edition, and the paperback royalties are shared between the author and the hardcover publisher. While many of the big paperback houses have produced a certain number of new, hitherto unpublished books, the paperback operation is dependent in the main upon books originating with the conventional publishers. It is a fallacy therefore to suppose that, for all their seeming dominance, the paperback is likely to oust the hardcover book.

Another type of paperback, selling in smaller numbers, has sprung from the enormous growth in the number of university students throughout the world. This is the reissue of works of scholarship, science, religion, literature, and art. Many had been out of print for years, and they had often been issued originally in small editions of no more than 2,000 copies by university presses or other specialized publishers. This great extension of the market began in the United States in the 1950s, with prices ranging from 65 cents to $1.95, at that time unusually high levels for paperbacks; the idea soon spread to Britain and the Continent. This operation has usually remained in the hands of the original publishers of the books, who have developed their own series of “university paperback books.” It became customary for many new academic books to be issued simultaneously in both cloth (hardcover) editions and as paperbacks, the usual price of the latter being a little more than half that of the cloth edition.

University and government presses

The increase in the number of universities was accompanied by an increase in the number of university presses. The purpose of these presses is to serve the needs of scholarship—i.e., to publish specialized material that a purely commercial firm would find impracticable to handle. Their freedom from the more acute profit-making pressures, often a result of direct subsidies, coupled with their assured, if limited, market, enables many to reach high standards of production and commercial viability. Some of the older establishments, such as the Oxford University Press, are, of course, large, profitable organizations with worldwide connections and a long list of more general publications.

Another type of publishing house not usually in direct competition with ordinary firms is the state printing office, which is responsible in many countries for issuing public and official material. In England, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, which was originally created in 1786 to coordinate office supplies for government departments, came to issue a wide range of excellent books and pamphlets in connection with museums, galleries, and the advisory function of ministries, besides official papers, before its privatization in 1996. In the United States, the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., was established by Congress in 1860 for similar purposes, and it steadily widened its field of operations. China developed a similar organization to issue its publications.

Modern publishing practice

Every publishing house has manufacturing, marketing, and accounts departments, but the heart of the business lies in the editorial function. This has changed in its mode of operation through the years and still varies from one country to another and between firms but not in essentials. The editor—who is sometimes called the sponsor and who is often a director—selects the books to be published, deals with the author, and is responsible for the critical reading of the typescript (and its revision if necessary) and for seeing the book through the press, in consultation with the manufacturing and marketing departments. So vital can this role be that a particular editor’s presence in a firm or transfer to another can be a major factor in attracting authors. Besides the editor, there is also an editorial department, which is responsible for the detailed preparation of the typescript before it is printed. This receives more attention today than in the past. Facts, figures, and references are checked, and inelegancies of style are polished where necessary. Careful attention by a skilled editor at this stage can contribute greatly to the quality of many books.

Educational publishing

A particular branch of editorial work that has grown to be of cardinal importance since World War II concerns the conception, planning, and publication of the hundreds of books needed for educational programs at every level. Throughout the world editors specializing in school books visit teachers and lecturers to promote the writing of the required texts. The educational editor must concentrate almost wholly upon the commissioning of books to fit a particular syllabus in a school or university. Rarely, if ever, does the editor receive an unsolicited typescript that can be accepted at once. The editor must seek material by regular visits, either personally or by an assistant, to schools or colleges to find the teachers who have the makings of authorship. Outlines or drafts of texts are evaluated by editors who develop the central themes into a usable form. Much time must then be spent on revision and production before the book is completed.

In the United States the boards of education in some of the larger states review the available textbooks and approve a selection for use in their school districts. This selection process is called adoption, and publishers compete to have their books adopted for use because of the large volume of sales that are thus guaranteed. The schoolbook that is widely adopted may sell for a generation and reward author and publisher on a scale beyond the dreams of those concerned only with general books. Equally, nothing can fail so completely as the schoolbook that gets no adoptions.

Forms of copyright

Book publishing depends fundamentally on copyright, which is the sole right to copy or to produce a work, conceded to the publisher by the author through a mutual agreement. Without this element of monopoly, it would be impossible for a publisher to trade. It is also the guarantee for an author that he has legal rights to prevent the use of his material without fair compensation. On the expiration of copyright, anyone is free to publish the work in question without payment to the author or his heirs. Copyright at one time was simple and indivisible; many alternative forms of text reproduction have developed, however. Their exploitation is governed by individual clauses in the agreement. These subsidiary rights may be briefly summarized. American rights for a British book and British rights for a book of American origin can prove to be exceptionally profitable. Though a book normally has its greatest sale in its country of origin, there are cases in which it does even better abroad. The richness of the American market gives it a particular attraction for publishers and authors of almost every other country. Translation rights have become a valuable source of additional revenue, particularly since the establishment of the Berne Convention.

All the signatory countries agreed to copyright protection for the unpublished works of nationals of other member countries and for all the work first published in the Convention countries. While many books may earn no more than a few hundred dollars from the rights of translation in a single country, some world best-sellers, by authors of international stature, have a demand in almost every country, new or old, for a translation, and the aggregate earnings are then immense. Paperback rights for the more salable books, whether fiction or fact, are customarily offered to one of the major paperback houses, which flourish in most larger countries. For a best-seller there can be keen competition between the paperback houses, and advances well into seven figures may be offered to the original publisher, who normally controls the reprint rights. The original publisher also stipulates the earliest date at which the paperback may appear; as a rule, this is not less than 12 months after first publication. Rights for serial publication may be sold in several divisions: first serial rights, for which the best price can be obtained from a large-circulation newspaper or magazine in the capital city, may allow the publication of a number of installments appearing several weeks ahead of the issue of the book, or the serialization may “straddle” the appearance of the book, some installments before, the rest after. Second serial rights, for which much less is paid, can still yield useful sums: after first serialization has taken place, lesser papers in other parts of the country, or in other countries where the same language is spoken, can use the book. Digest rights, and their allied condensed book rights, represent another lucrative subsidiary use for books of wide general appeal.

Book club rights are also among those the publisher can exploit; the fees received from the clubs are also shared with the author. Broadcast and television rights in books interest a publisher primarily for the possibility of bringing a book and its author to the attention of a large segment of the public, rather than for the amounts paid. As a rule, there must be direct quotation from the text if a broadcasting company is to pay anything to the publisher. A television interview with the author, including sight of a copy of the book, is of great publicity value, and the author may even receive a fee for the appearance, but this is not part of the book’s earnings. If the author can show a film relating to the book, it would be paid for at the appropriate rates for television use. In radio broadcasting, the reading of a book as a serial is one most remunerative possibility; the other is its full dramatization as a serial. The latter is, of course, still more valuable on television. Such use of new books has become more frequent; in the past this treatment was more often accorded to works of classic status. Dramatic and film rights can have importance for fiction, biography, and other general books, but only a small fraction of 1 percent of those published can be exploited by these means. From the publisher’s standpoint, it is reasonable to share in the proceeds from the sale of these rights, for they result from the publisher’s efforts.

The last group of subsidiary rights, rights for mechanical reproduction by film micrography, xerography, tape or disc recording, or any other technique of sight or sound, are of increasing concern to publishers. Dry-copying machines, easily operated, are to be found throughout the world in public, university, and school libraries, and while ordinarily only single copies can legally be made solely for the purposes of private study, it is a simple matter, though illegal, to run off a number of copies of long extracts, which then make it unnecessary to buy more than one copy of the book. Similarly, microfilm enables a single copy to satisfy many users and reduces the number of copies of the book that must be kept available in a library. Wherever material originates in the form of a book, however, the publisher must retain an interest in all forms of reproduction as part of his resources for promoting experimental and imaginative work.

Publisher’s agreement

A publisher’s agreement with an author normally specifies that in consideration of certain payments the former shall, during the legal term of copyright, have the exclusive right to produce or reproduce the said work in any material legible form throughout the world. In many cases, however, this agreement is modified to exclude some of the subsidiary rights named above, depending on the bargaining power of the author or his agent. After clauses specifying the extent of the rights conferred, the basic clause of a royalty agreement is that which states the rate of royalty to be paid. A typical wording is as follows: “On all copies of the said work sold on the normal terms a royalty of ten percent shall be paid on the published price rising to twelve percent after the sale of 5,000 copies and to fifteen percent after 10,000 copies.” Other clauses provide for somewhat lower royalty rates on export sales and on cheap editions, on which the publisher’s margin of profit is considerably less. Provision is also made for division between author and publisher of any payments received for such subsidiary rights as are included in the agreement. A publisher can fairly claim a share in them if they arise from the fact of book publication. Proofreading is another important matter covered by the agreement, the author being responsible for this. If the cost of making his corrections exceeds a stated figure he must pay for the excess. Lastly, in the majority of publishing agreements there is an option clause under which the author undertakes to give the publisher the first offer of his “next literary work suitable for publication in book form,” usually with the addition that if, after a stipulated time, no terms shall have been agreed on for its publication the author is free to submit it elsewhere. The exact form of the legal instrument varies in detail; it is possibly drawn up in the greatest detail by U.S. firms because of the complexities of their system of selling: e.g., by mail order, subscription, and similar means, in which the publisher must incur abnormal costs in order to secure the business. The vital condition for this publisher–author relationship, in the past often conducted with complete informality, is that there must be a legal document, a contract, setting out the rights and obligations of the two parties.

Literary agents and scouts

Literary agents have become increasingly important and prominent as publishing has grown more complex. A high proportion of the more successful authors of novels and general books now employ literary agents to place their books with publishers and to handle negotiations with them, the author being charged a commission of 10 percent. Besides negotiating and drawing up the contract with the firm, the good agency is equipped to handle the many subsidiary rights. Because an important element in the agent’s value to an author is his capacity to extract better terms than the author would himself, it is not surprising that publishers have resented the agent’s intrusion into the personal, and often very friendly, relationships between themselves and their authors. There can be no doubt, however, that agents do perform a valuable service in relieving an author of the considerable amount of routine work that his literary affairs may involve. Advice on possible new books to be written and occasionally, for the author of exceptional promise, an advance on anticipated earnings are also part of the assistance that the agent may offer. It must be emphasized, however, that agents are interested mainly in general books; they are seldom equipped to handle specialized and technical works.

Another publishing auxiliary who became significant in the 1950s and 1960s is the literary scout. Though a few had been employed earlier, mainly by U.S. publishers, who had their “lookouts” in one or two European cities, the practice is now more widespread. Many European publishers employ residents in London, Paris, and New York City to alert them at once to any promising new book, either written or just published. The scout, who may be connected with a newspaper or literary agency, is usually paid some modest amount as a retainer, probably with a commission of 1 or 2 percent on the published price of the books he recommends, in effect a small royalty on sales. On occasion a valuable find can be quite lucrative to the scout; frequently everything depends upon the speed with which a copy of the work can be got into the hands of his principal.

Selling and promotion

The publisher’s techniques for book promotion have become increasingly sophisticated in all advanced countries. The typical traveler or book salesman is likely to hold a college degree, certainly in the United States; he receives a careful briefing from the home office, with elaborate samples and sales aids, and perhaps a car provided, or partly provided, by the firm. The itinerary for calls on bookshops (or in the case of the educational representative, schools and colleges) is prescribed by a supervisor, who usually checks the resulting orders against a quota. A well-run publishing house issues two or three seasonal announcement lists with details of its forthcoming books, as well as an annual catalog of its present and past books still in print, which are sent to the principal booksellers and librarians. For many books, a prospectus may be issued, both for the use of booksellers and for direct mailing by the publisher. The distribution of review copies to the press is the last item in the normal program. These three steps, traveling, catalogs, and reviews, are the vital elements in the machinery of book distribution, which it is virtually impossible to accomplish without the professional work of a publisher. The capacity of some authors to produce a quite presentable book with the help of a printer still leaves them far from their objective unless they can find a publisher to undertake its distribution.

Newspaper and periodical advertising is the publisher’s principal means of reaching the public, and standards here have also risen considerably since World War II. Originally handled entirely by the publisher’s own staff, it is now not uncommon for the larger houses, especially in the United States and in some European countries, to employ advertising agencies to prepare the copy and the general details of the campaign for any important book. While few authors consider that their books are advertised adequately and most publishers are highly doubtful whether press advertising does in fact sell books, the amounts spent in relation to sales revenue are much higher than for most other commodities, seldom less than 5 percent for new books. Without their receipts from publishers’ advertising, some periodicals would find it impossible to devote so much space to book reviews, which are in themselves a most valuable aid to sales. The news value of many new books also enables them to secure free publicity through references in the general, as distinct from the literary, pages of a newspaper. A publisher with imagination, or the firm’s press officer if there is one, can often suggest aspects of a book susceptible to such treatment. Broadcasting and television services, too, can sometimes be interested in books and their authors, and the resultant publicity may then be extremely effective.

Over the whole field of sales promotion, as publishing houses have grown in size and profitability, there has been a marked tendency for the more commercial methods of general business to be applied to books, which are aggressively promoted to retailers and the public in the same manner as are many other commodities. Though this may increase sales, at least in the short term, it may be doubted whether it is in the interests of the public and to the long-term advantage of good publishing.

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Latin verb publicare, from which publishing is derived, means "to make public." The publishing industry is one of the largest enterprises in the world. It encompasses the printing and circulation of books, magazines, newspapers, advertising brochures, musical scores, maps, calendars, diaries, timetables, greeting cards, directories, and more. Of these the publishing of books is by far the oldest. The newest is software publishing for the millions of users of personal computers. (See also book and bookmaking; magazine and journal; newspaper.)

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